River News: Our View

Way back in the years following World War II, the great poet Dylan Thomas wrote a stunning poem in which he closed with this powerful last line: “After the first death, there is no other.”

That is perhaps one of the most important sentences ever written, and so on this Christmas, with the world war-torn and war-weary and with violence celebrated more than it has perhaps ever been, we wish to remind everyone everywhere that, indeed, after the first death, there is no other.

To which many of you are likely wondering, and rightly so, what the hell are they talking about?

Just this: We are talking about the imperative need for peace in this world. Today, if possible, and, if not, on January 20 or as soon as possible thereafter. We are talking about the need for nations to lay down their bloodthirsty quests for conquest, and for the warmongers of industry and government to finally be confronted and stopped. 

Our holiday message is somber but crucial. At year’s end the world inches ever closer by the day to nuclear war, or to at least bloody world war. Sadly, our government plays recklessly and provocatively with other nations, and encourages bloodshed rather than hardball negotiation and peace through strength. Hopefully that changes on January 20.

We are talking about the illuminating but brutal truth that, as Thomas reminded us, in any war, the first death in a conflict embraces and encompasses and catalyzes all the others that follow. Or to say it another way, one death in a war is one death too many, but it predestines so many more.

True, sometimes war is not avoidable, as when it comes in defense of something humanity cannot afford to relinquish to evil, such as liberty. Then, and only then, should patriots fight to the death, one and all. But war for the sake of war, war for power and profit, war for globalism, war for terrorism — all those and other offensive invasions are incomprehensibly evil, wars in which, after the first death, there truly is no other.

The name of Thomas’s poem was “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London,” about the death of a young girl in a World War II air raid. The poem’s narrator is defiant in his refusal to mourn her death, which he considered to be a blasphemy of her “elegy of innocence and youth.”

Why? Because the loss of innocent life and especially of youthful life in war is too profound for conventional grief. The narrator is not without emotion, just the opposite: In such a world-altering situation, standard-issue grief can only trivialize the war dead, not honor them.

It is, in other words, inadequate to convey not only the needed respect but its stunning implications: that the world, or some evil part of it, is willing to take from us in war the uniqueness and preciousness of innocent human life. Such life should not be disrespected with ordinary condolences — “The majesty and burning of the child’s death I shall not murder with any further elegy of innocence and youth,” Thomas wrote.

Such lives must be resurrected to earthly honor in a way that respects the dignity of their souls.

Indeed, Thomas reminds us, the girl is both a martyr and a daughter — London’s daughter, our daughter. The murder of one daughter is the murder of all our daughters. She is condemned to death by a human war machine (“the mankind of her going”) and takes with her “a grave truth,” that “deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter, robed in the long friends, the grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother, secret by the unmourning water of the riding Thames.”

The grave truth that, after the first death, there is no other.

In the same sense this holiday season, we must refuse to mourn the deaths of today’s war dead as just more casualties in the world’s business-as-usual combat, as just more collateral damage from elites or terrorist proxies fighting each other. 

The murder of sons and daughters in Israel on October 7, 2023, was the murder of our own sons and daughters, and we must remember them in ways that respect rather than trivialize them. Their heavenly afterlife is secure but we can secure their earthly afterlife only through policies and actions that make sure there will be no more “first deaths” at Israeli music festivals or on Israeli kibbutzim.

Those who now mourn the deaths of innocents in Gaza should especially take to heart Thomas’s words. All the deaths that followed October 7 were preordained by that massacre.

The same for Ukraine. The same for migrant violence on the streets of the United States, an invasion that has led to war in our cities and the murders of our innocent neighbors and family members and friends. The same for those who assassinate, or try to, our leaders, whether at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, or on the streets of Manhattan. The same for those who celebrate war and assassination.

Our hearts at Christmas must be dedicated to peace and the need for peace, but peace only comes through strength and resolve to confront those who wage war against us, whether foreign enemy or the United States government, to make sure they understand that to attack one of us is to attack all of us.

The Bible implores “on earth peace to men of good will,” and so let us give thanks for the ascendency of people of good will this next year. Let us all gather round our families this holiday season and toast everyone’s love and life. Let us give thanks for that which we are blessed to have, and to resolve to work toward a world in which others will be blessed with both inner peace and material comfort.

And let us sing a new resolve — not to mourn the war dead all around us, so mounting in numbers they are, but to build a world in which the refusal to routinely mourn them is not necessary because there are no war dead. A world in which there are no assassinations and illegal invasions. A world in which the celebration of murder is not only trivialized but cast out. 

Let us light the lights of a new paved path of peace, and put behind us the war-torn bombed-out rubble of the past. Let’s put an end to war and the war-state. To do that, we need to constantly remind ourselves of two things — that peace only comes to those of good will, and that, after the first death of war, there is no other.

Here’s hoping everyone had a very Merry Christmas and that you have a very prosperous new year, filled with joy and good will and, most of all, with peace.